


Wine-Like

by Palebluedot



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Morning After, Post-Finale, if you're looking for porn this will waste your time, post-reunion, sappy old men keeping the romance alive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 11:21:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15072116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Palebluedot/pseuds/Palebluedot
Summary: "I say," James manages, his lips tautening with stifled laughter."Quite," says Thomas. He's found his glasses now, and James watches him catalog the sharper details of the wreckage, attempt to retrace the causes in his mind and bite back a growing smile of his own. "Did you happen to notice, while we...?"James shakes his head.





	Wine-Like

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends, it's been a while! I'm spending most of my summer in Greece with unreliable internet access and without my laptop, so my capacity to effectively edit and post fic is painfully diminished, but I'm doing my best! I hope you enjoy this story I lovingly typed up on my tiny, glitchy phone keyboard <3

Waking comes slowly, motion comes more slowly still. With the sun in his face and sleep in his eyes, James lies with his face pressed into Thomas's ribs, his lips squashed and his neck faintly aching. He's awake too, the fingers tracing their well-worn path down James's spine give it away. James sighs through his nose, content. To return the signal, he pushes his own fingers in a lazy circle across Thomas's chest, and comes across a familiar texture — a bit of seed that escaped the cloth in the dark, no doubt. Thomas takes his hand and kisses it. Message received, and a morning properly begun.

James kisses the damp patch his long, slack-mouthed rest left on Thomas's skin before folding his hands, pillow-like, on Thomas's belly and laying his chin there to smile up at him. "Good morning," he says, and Thomas, with his tousled hair and crinkling eyes, smiles back.

"Good morning yourself," Thomas replies, squinting a bit for want of his glasses. He turns his gaze away from James, perhaps to seek them out, but stops well short of their end table. "Oh, my." At James's questioning look, he points to the foot of the bed.

It takes some careful shifting to unweave himself from Thomas's legs without crushing his thigh, but once freed, it is easy for James to see what caught Thomas's attention. Their mattress, knocked several degrees askew and a corner hanging well off the bed. Their sheets, spilled in a linen waterfall. Clothes strewn about and buried in the mess, a bottle of oil corked but overturned, a fresh stain there and another here, and in the middle of it all, the love-bitten, thoroughly-ruffled pair of them, surveying the scene with staring eyes.

"I say," James manages, his lips tautening with stifled laughter.

"Quite," says Thomas. He's found his glasses now, and James watches him catalog the sharper details of the wreckage, attempt to retrace the causes in his mind and bite back a growing smile of his own. "Did you happen to notice, while we...?"

James shakes his head. He can't recall being particularly raucous, simply _immersed._  It would be most romantic to say that their lovemaking had blinded him to a hurricane that upturned the room, but he knows it hadn't needed to. Why should he care where his shirt falls, should Thomas see fit to unbutton it? If Thomas asks for a pillow to raise up his hips, how can James spare a thought for what obstacles he sweeps aside as he fetches one?

That last instance he remembers vividly — Thomas hadn't needed to say it was the old stiffness flaring up again, and he'd smiled gratefully when James rubbed soothing circles above his hipbones with his thumbs, then reclined and relaxed, sending James unexpectedly, blissfully deeper. He smiles, now, to think of their mingled laughing gasps.

"Oh," says Thomas, pointing again, this time over the side of the bed. "There's been a casualty." He reaches down and produces the volume James has been keeping on the end table of late, replacing the bookmark with a sheepish grin.

James fits an arm around Thomas's shoulders as he takes it, laughing. "No harm done," he says, kissing his husband's temple. "We certainly made a thorough job of it, didn't we?"

"That we did," Thomas agrees. His eyes twinkle with amusement and satisfaction both. "Not a bad effort for two silly old men."

"I'm not yet _so_ old," James protests mildly.

"Mm, but you are," says Thomas. "You're an old man — _my_ old man, and so you shall remain until long after you're such a sagging mess of wrinkles no one else will be able to imagine that you use a bed for anything but sleeping."

James hears the pride in Thomas's voice at his toothless jest, and the truth of it rings through his bones. Their bodies have grown old alongside their love, and the two have changed together. James can recall how his muscles once stretched, how Thomas would match him, the endless clever shapes they could make. So many of them are but memories now. Between Thomas's finicky hips and his own grumbling knees, they have limits, requirements, vulnerabilities that they never felt before.

All those years ago, James had fretted how Thomas might look upon him once the bewildered joy of reunion faded and he found him wanting. There, Thomas was right twice — James has grown silly as well as old.

"As if I'll care what they imagine," says James. "I'll have a wrinkled old man of my own to keep me occupied."

Thomas laughs, a bright, lovely sound, and bends to rest his nose against the side of James's jaw. He nuzzles there gently, and the sun falls through their window, warm and white. It's grown high without their notice. There's no hurry, after all.

"We have a bit of tidying up to do, it seems," says James. "But perhaps that should wait until after breakfast, hm?"

Thomas loops his arms around James's shoulders in a playful embrace. "Oh, I'm afraid breakfast will have to wait as well."

Thomas's grin has grown devilish; James knows by the sound. "Is that so?"

"Why, of course. We've made our bed, my dear, and now it seems we shall have to lie in it."

James finds he neither has nor wants a counterargument. He sighs when Thomas's kisses first brush his neck, returns what he's given when he reaches his lips, and obligingly lowers himself down to the tangle of blankets as Thomas straddles his thighs and nudges his shoulders.

For a moment, Thomas shines above him, a vision in silver as the morning light glints off his changing hair and the edges of his frames. After looking his fill, James pulls the glasses from his face and deposits them and the book safely aside before employing both his hands with the business of pulling his husband down to meet him.

Their weight shifts, the mattress creaks and slips still further. Thomas takes the time for a brief laugh before he devotes his touch and breath and voice to coaxing James's pleasure from him as hands pluck strings for song. It's as fine a fit as always when James wraps his arms around Thomas's back and holds him so they're chest to chest, comforting and so sweetly familiar. He kisses him and the room fades and ceases to matter, for their mattress may be crooked, but no matter how they move together, their bed remains rooted to the spot.

**Author's Note:**

> This is very much inspired by ["Familiarity" by Francesca Bell,](https://francescabellpoet.com/links/) which I highly recommend! 
> 
> Typing on my phone is sort of brutal, so I probably won't reliably answer, but comments are still love <3


End file.
